This invention is related to electronic circuitry and, more particularly, to circuitry for detecting and analyzing a transient signal.
Many areas of experimentation and testing which employ electronic equipment utilize signal processing circuitry which is adapted to operate on data in the form of electrical signals and to extract various forms of information about that data. Moreover, in such applications, it is frequently desirable to convert such data to a digital form in order to facilitate the use of digital computation techniques for processing the data, thereby permitting enhanced accuracy and analysis and a greater amount of processing than would otherwise be possible.
The digitization of a transient signal using a sample and hold circuit and an analog to digital converter is known in the signal processing art. In conventional techniques of this sort, the sample and hold device retains the peak value of the signal, which is then supplied to the analog to digital converter. In this prior art circuitry, however, no time reference is made available to determine when the peak value occurred.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide signal processing circuitry capable of detecting not only the peak value but also the time of occurrence of a transient signal. It would further be desirable to provide such circuitry which is capable of rendering this signal acquisition process as fully automatic as possible.